The Motya Charioteer comes to London: the most tantalising marble sculpture in the world

For the length of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the British Museum is
displaying a supreme memorial to the ancient Olympiad.

Unique: The Motya Charioteer on temporary display at the British Museum

By Andrew Graham-Dixon

8:37AM BST 09 Aug 2012

With surpisingly little fanfare, the most tantalising marble sculpture in the entire world was recently placed on display at the British Museum. It is to be found in Gallery 18, among the Elgin Marbles.

The work in question was created between 480 and 470 B.C., some 20 years before the sculptures of the Parthenon frieze, with which it can now for the first time be compared. It is of equal quality, albeit very different: a single, powerfully erotic freestanding sculpture, created not to adorn a temple but to mark a victory at the ancient Olympic Games.

The so-called Motya Charioteer was unearthed in 1979 during archaeological excavations on the island now known as Mozia, off the western coast of Sicily. Normally housed in a small museum there, it has been loaned by Sicily’s cultural authorities for the modern Games in London. Over the next few weeks anyone who happens to be in the city can go and see it, free of charge. Everyone who can, should. It is a unique and extraordinary thing.

The stone figure is slightly larger than life for an ancient Greek, around five feet eleven inches tall. His feet are missing, as are his right arm and hand and his left arm. His left hand remains, pressed into the soft-seeming flesh of his hip, indicating that the arm was originally held jauntily akimbo. There are four bronze nails embedded in the figure’s cranium, which once would have held a laurel wreath of victory.

This detail indicates the probable action of the figure’s missing right arm. He would have been adjusting the wreath on his head, feeling the measure of his triumph (as the Greek athletes shown on Attic vases often do). The expression on his young but sharply individual face conveys a mixture of exhaustion and proud serenity. The exhaustion is unsurprising. Ancient chariot races were gruelling events. Up to 40 chariots might compete in a contest that could extend over as much as eight miles, staged on an oblong track with a turning post at either end – a common site for crashes and pile-ups.

The figure is identified as a charioteer by his clothing: he wears the regulation dress of a sleeveless chiton, clinging to his muscular and beautifully modelled body in a cascade of folds like so many waves or ripples.

This light and diaphanous garment, which makes the body beneath seem so much more present, so much more voluptuously actual than if it were merely naked, has been worked by the sculptor with breathtaking skill. It accentuates the slight bulge of the genitals, the muscularity of the buttocks, the contours of calf and thigh, plunging the viewer with almost disconcerting immediacy into the world of ancient Greece as it was in the age of Pericles: a world where the young male athlete was not only a hero, but also an object of intense homo-erotic fascination. The chiton clings tightly to the charioteer’s body because, by implication, it is soaked with the sweat of his exertions.

The immense sophistication of the carving makes it very unlikely to have been created by an artist working at the Sicilian margin of the ancient Greek world. It was almost certainly created by one of the great masters of Athenian sculpture and probably commissioned by the charioteer himself, who most likely took it home to Sicily in person to immortalise his famous triumph.

The rulers of Greek Sicily, whose fertile plains were well suited to the breeding of horses, were particularly devoted to chariot racing. It was far more expensive for them to participate in the Olympic Games than it was for their rivals in mainland Greece, given that their horses, trainers and necessary equipment had to be sent over long distances by land and sea. So when they did win, they spared no expense in celebrating their victories, commissioning odes from poets such as Pindar – and sculptures such as the Motya Charioteer.

How did this work of art end up on that small Sicilian island? The question is all the more puzzling given that Motya was a stronghold not of the Greeks but of the Phoenicians and then the Carthaginians. Its route is likely to have been circuitous. The most plausible explanation is that it was taken to the island as booty towards the end of the fifth century B.C., when Carthaginian armies from Motya sacked the Greek Sicilian cities of Akragas and Gela. Whatever the precise story behind it, one thing is certain.

The Motya Charioteer is the very earliest sculpture in marble fully to incarnate the classical Greek ideal of art – to achieve a quite new ambition, namely that of creating a human body from stone that might look as beguilingly real as an actual human body of flesh and blood. From the first step that it represents, the entire Western tradition of art itself would follow.

So when we look at the Motya Charioteer, we are not only gazing upon the image of an athlete who has finished his race. We are also going back to our own beginnings, back to the very starting-line of our civilisation.